Five Things That Never Happened to Abbey Bartlet
by peregrinepandora
Summary: Five things that might have made her life a little bit easier. Sorted chronologically, across five universes.


**Let's See How Brave You Are: Five Things That Never Happened to Abbey Bartlet**

* * *

_I.__ Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned._

From where she stood under the hazy autumn shade, it seemed like a good idea. She could walk over; she could say hello. She could even ask for a blessing, and perhaps ought to have done so. Even then, she knew she'd need it. A bright ray of light hit her toe before Ron had snuck up behind her.

"Abbey, what're you up to?" he asked her.

She stared off into the distance where He was the center of attention, quietly, gracefully.

She walked away with Ron, thinking, _He'll__ make a wonderful priest one day_.

_

* * *

II. and fate has led you through it/you do what you have to do_

Cumulatively, it had taken hours at the Xerox, over long, sad summer days. Finding minutes in her schedule, and minutes in the others' when they wouldn't be around. A bottle of wine and a ream of paper that would leave a trail a mile long. Forty-seven prescriptions, signed in her own flowery print; dozens of dozens of charts; a written admission.

The package weighed 18 pounds, and the postage cost $12.28 for priority mail. She'd been careful to sign the check gracefully; she knew she'd be seeing it again.

"Thank you, Mrs. Bartlet," they'd said, eyeing the security camera.

She sat in her car, parked crosswise from the mailbox, for seven days that were only minutes. She checked the address again: ATTN: Danny Concannon. He had been kind to Jed; he would keep being kind.

She knew it would break him, break them, but she couldn't let this kill him.

She pushed the package into the box.

* * *

_III. Game On_

"I told the girls not to come," she said. Jed looked at her listlessly. "I called them and told them."

"Fine."

"Because I don't want them to—"

"I said, that's fine." He had never needed to raise his voice.

The air in the room—holding cell—was an equal duality: silent and motionless, full of everything.

C.J. walked in with little gusto. CNN showed the radiant Ritchies arriving all smiles. "Here's the tie," C.J. told him. "It looks fine on camera."

"They lost the lucky tie?" he said, sloppily knotting it.

C.J. nodded, and he nodded back with that odd resignation Abbey had never learned to read.

"Fifteen seconds, Mr. President," came from the door.

He tipped his head to her and left wordlessly. C.J. waited a minute, waited for something to happen, and then waited for the inevitable silence to end.

"Let's go," Abbey said.

"Mr. President, your response?"

"Our great nation is but a...a...a collection of...of individuals. Sometimes what's right for the individual, though—that is to say, I'm an economist and it doesn't...—We need to come together as a nation..."

The hearts and stomachs of the staff had fallen nearly as far as his approval rating.

"It's Uncle Fluffy," C.J. lamented.

Abbey was thanking God.

_

* * *

IV. If you'd have married him, he'd be President._

"Heart attack!" someone called at her, handing her a chart. "Brought him up from the E.R. Needs double bypass. They're prepping him."

"Josiah Bartlet," she said quietly. "Does that name sound familiar to you?"

The nurse looked at her blankly. "We found this guy in a ditch."

* * *

_V. And__ that has made all the difference._

His hands fall easily around her waist as her own busy themselves with the dishes. "How was class?" she asks him.

"It was fine, fine," he tells her.

"You're lying," she says. "What happened?"

He shrugs and pulls away, and she drops the dishes into the sink in turn.

"They don't know anything about anything," he whines to her. "Not even a vague appreciation for the great art and science that is economics."

She nearly laughs in relief. Paranoia told her his hands were shaking, that he was holding himself a little oddly.

"Hoynes is back in the news, that bastard," he grumbles into her hair. "Three Presidents later and he's still in the news."

After a long pause, she knows he has gotten to the point. "Do you ever wonder what would have happened if I'd have run?"

He had asked her that far too often, every time he read something or saw something that upset him. Every time there was a new war on something, or a new study showed just how many American children lived in poverty. He'd retreat to his study and pretend to be working and she'd find him slumped over a few hours later, a paper napkin folded lovingly between the pages of a book. Bartlet for America. That's what they might have been.

She thinks of all the other things they might have been. She thinks of the dinners, the speeches, the floor votes. She thinks of the glamour, and the excitement. She thinks of him launching a war. Of the hard, aching nights when he would come home to her a different man. And for the first time, she lets herself think of him dying, a gunshot in his chest, or a stroke, or a fever, or exhaustion. She thinks of him paralyzed, and she thanks God for Dartmouth and John Hoynes.

She's shaking again, but he is too and doesn't notice. "You have a big brain, a good heart, and an ego the size of Montana, Jed." She tells him what she always tells him, and reminds him that Leo called.

* * *

A/N: Well. I've ventured into the realm of West Wing. This was really fun to write, so I hope you've enjoyed it. 


End file.
